For Tech Digest’s latest information about the UK launch of Apple’s OS X 10.5 Leopard, bookmark this post and check back frequently.

Hint: If you find operating systems, and the liveblogging of them, immensely boring, then you’re advised not to continue reading this post. You’ve been warned!

11.10pm: Flagging a bit. Best bet is to stop the “live blog” and review some of the features in more depth tomorrow.

10.25pm: Startup is very quick now – almost straight to login screen
10.10pm: Quick Look is great – you can open multiple documents of different types and have them all there, without the original applications having to open, and just leaf between them. Complete PDFs, Excel spreadsheets. Brilliant.

Will have to check what applications (if not all) it supports. Seems very speedy, too, loaded things pretty quick. Impressed.

10.01pm: Application “Help” drop down menus now include a Spotlight-style search box, which appears to then only search in that application. It’s persistent (i.e. you type something and it searches, leave the menu, go back to it, the results are still there, but when there are results, the other normal menu items disappear) Not sure if I like that yet.

9.05pm: Going to download the latest version of SwitchResX from the developer site (3.7.10) to see if it works in Leopard. I know this is boring for people without display issues, but it is bugging me big time! Please bear with me.

Oh by the way, Stacks is cool.

Spotlight looks fast, too, on a Core 2 Duo Intel iMac at least, though I haven’t tested the extra logic searching yet. The options page looks the same as under 10.4.

9.00pm: Spaces: Can have up to 16 spaces, in a 4×4 grid. Nice. Think 4 will do to begin with.

8.58pm: Might be mistaken, but Mail’s spam filters look to be better than before. We’ll see.

8.55pm: Displays is something will need to look at. Pain. It’s usable for now. On we go, looking to get the Stacks working. Moved dock to the bottom of the screen (used to have it far left) as the translucency looks better there.

There were three software updates waiting, not sure if they were for Leopard compatibility. Probably. One was Garageband.

8.30pm: Something’s up with the resolution on my monitor, but I was having problems before, so hoping that SwitchResX works – crashed first time, now has loaded…

8.25pm: That last minute was a long one. Restarted, logged in. The “starfield” screenshot came up first, but then it went back to the last screen image I had. I might switch back. It appears not yet to have restored the screen resolution. Looks a bit odd.

Wow, everything I usually auto start is coming up and shouting at me. Skype wants a keychain access, Mail needs updating. Trying to get to the monitor settings. There’s some whooshing going on in the background too. Registration, probably. Hang on!!

8.15pm: Five minutes left to install. Hopefully. Time to make a cuppa (yeah, beer would be more rock’n’roll but i’m in my 30s haha) – then go!